Stardust jury to deliver majority verdicts today

Stardust jury to deliver majority verdicts today

The jury in the landmark Stardust inquests will deliver their verdicts at 2pm today, almost a year to the day since the inquests for the 48 victims of the fire tragedy began in Dublin.

Having deliberated for around 40 hours across 11 days, Coroner Dr Myra Cullinane recalled the jury after lunchtime Wednesday to ask if it was possible that they could return a unanimous verdict to which the foreman of the jury replied: “No”.

Dr Cullinane then told the jury of five men and seven women that they could return verdicts if they could agree by a simple majority. Less than 20 minutes later, the jury returned to say they had reached majority verdicts.

She said she would defer the delivery of these verdicts until today to allow families and friends of the deceased, some of whom are expected to travel long distances, to attend the Pillar Room in person.

The verdicts available to the jury are accidental death, death by misadventure, unlawful killing, an open verdict, and a narrative verdict. During their closing submissions, legal teams representing the families of the 48 who died urged the jury to return an unlawful killing verdict.

In the early hours of February 14, 1981, a fire quickly swept through the popular north Dublin venue known as the Stardust just after the final of a disco dancing competition that had attracted hundreds of young people from around the city.

Following long, sustained campaigning from families of victims stretching back decades, the Attorney General in 2019 granted new inquests into the deaths. He said there’d been an “insufficiency of inquiry” at the original inquests into the circumstances of their deaths and that it was in the public interest to hold these fresh inquests.

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